Critique of Margaret Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa"

Margaret Mead began her fieldwork in Samoa under the instruction of Franz Boas. The goal was to demonstrate that culture is relative, rather than concrete. Because of this very explicit goal, Mead’s research has come under fire of criticism, stating that she may have skewed her results to make a point. Indeed, she was searching for one example to contradict the ideas of Freud. The work required to disprove a theory is significantly less strenuous than to prove it. Freudian theory states that adolescence is an unstable time due to biology, an idea that is still popular today. Many teachers, parents, and therapists of adolescents will state that young adults are emotionally turbulent by nature, due to the hormonal and physical changes they are facing. Mead seeks out a culture, any culture, where this is not true, so that she can disprove Freud. Her ultimate goal is to see that even supposedly universal rules are culturally specific, and to answer the question of whether the difficulties faced by young adults “were… due to being adolescent or to being adolescent in America?” (pg 129).

Mead’s goal is admirable, and most modern anthropologists will agree that the transformation from childhood to adulthood is primarily a cultural construction. However, where I take issue is not with her objective or her thesis, but with her motivation for choosing Samoa as her research site. Mead explains, in some detail, what she was looking for in a research site, as well as why she ultimately chose Samoa. Mead says that to study culture, because we cannot use laboratory techniques, the anthropologist must seek out other cultures that are different from our own. Her claim is that the anthropologist should seek out simple civilizations, stating “A primitive people without a written language present a much less elaborate problem and a trained student can master the fundamental structure of a primitive society in a few months” (pg 130). To me, this claim hearkens back to the theory of cultural evolutionism, and would do shame to the Boasian principle that there are no hierarchies to culture.

In Mead’s defense, it is clear that some civilizations have fewer moving parts than others. In this way, they may simpler. I will also defend the use of the word primitive, but only because of the time at which Mead was writing. Clearly, this word would be inappropriate today, but at the time what was meant was “less complex”, “tribal”, “hunter-gatherer”, or equivalent. Nonetheless, the use of the word is consistent with word choice from cultural evolutionists, and is likely to inspire in the reader feelings of superiority to this inferior culture. In this way, Mead is reversing the progress done by Boas. In addition, Mead’s claim that any culture, even a simpler one, can be mastered in a matter of months strikes me as foolish and condescending. Clearly, there are intricacies and nuances in any group that take more time than mere months to learn. She also uses this argument to justify her use of only fifty young women in her case study, claiming that the culture is completely homogeneous. Even within a small group, there are differences between individuals and families. If there is an opportunity to study a larger population of the group, it should be seized. Indeed, some of the most interesting conclusions about a society come not from the majority, or “Joe Normal,” but from the outliers and how they navigate their unique cultural struggles.

Mead also seeks to use her fieldwork to inform American culture. To teach the average American, not just fellow anthropologists, that we can learn from vastly different societies how to better our own, and to demonstrate that what was previously considered biologically determined is in fact highly influenced by culture. In this way, she is comparing cultures, and thereby deviating from the beliefs of Boas. However, this deviation I support. Though it is important to attempt to see a culture without our own cultural lens, without some amount of comparison anthropology is simply knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Mead’s work delves into a new use of anthropology to inform and improve our own cultural identity.

I greatly admire Mead’s work, and her ability to see that American culture can be improved upon through understanding of exotic cultures. However, she spent so much time travelling between groups and attempting to master them so quickly, I have to wonder what she might have learn had she stayed with one group throughout her career. Clearly she was doing something right, as her contributions to anthropology are undeniable in their importance, but I wonder how her view of each group may have changed with more depth and less breadth.